A single sentence kept scrolling across the BBC World news ticker throughout Thursday afternoon. It read: "Redknapp: my agony is over." The more this statement was repeated as the day wore on, the more desperately insistent it seemed to become – not to mention patently untrue. Harry Redknapp is very likely to be appointed as the next temp‑to‑perm England manager. With this in mind the idea that his agony is in any sense "over" seems hugely optimistic. In fact the opposite is probably true. Redknapp: my agony is just beginning.

Which is exactly how it should be, because the agony of England managerdom, properly realised, is an agony of grand operatic performance, an agony that has been fatally absent from the post in the past four years. It has become a commonplace that the key requirement for any new England manager is to be the complete opposite of whoever went before you. Just as Glenn Hoddle was awkward and arch and looked like he might say something weird if you found yourself alone with him in a lift: so the almost oppressively personable Kevin Keegan seemed the ideal replacement.

And just as Keegan began to appear on the touchline wearing the facial expression of a four-year-old boy who has just let the handbrake off the furniture van and gone rumbling off down the cul-de-sac see-sawing desperately at the steering wheel, so we turned instead to Sven, with his air of step-daddish assurance, his uncreased slacks, his indestructible blankness.

It is tempting to suggest this oscillation between extremes has now settled on its most basic quality: foreign must be followed by English. But there is more to it than this. It is instead a question of agony. Fabio Capello felt no agony as England manager and this was his greatest crime. Occasionally there was a sting of exasperation, some on-field affront to his personal grandeur that brought him leaping up off his leatherette pitch-side throne, swivelling his neck like a disgruntled silverback. But by the end Capello seemed almost to hate English football, and this clearly will not do as the England team is essentially an entertainment and for it to work we need to care about the characters. This is less about being English and more about a sense of shared pain and vertiginous hope, without which international football just starts to look irrelevant. Watching Capello emerge scowling but unmarked from England's World Cup collapse was a bit like watching Chuck Norris play King Lear. All very surly and muscular. But where, exactly, was the wheel of pain?

This is the thing about England managers. The job must infest every pore. Standing in your sweat-soaked pyjamas on a flaking hotel balcony watching sallow dawn creep across some sulphurous Balkan coalfield, you must still resemble the England manager. The folds of your blazer must vibrate with cardboard pageantry. And the job must do peculiar things to you, rearranging your particles beneath its irradiating forces. Towards the end of his time Graham Taylor would repeatedly make a kind of mute chest‑beating gorilla gesture to his players from the touchline, intended to convey who knows what. Don Revie, perhaps the most visibly gripped of all England managers, would appear suddenly pitch-side in flapping overcoat-epaulettes, unignorable, haunted by some ancient jittery magic.

Other managers besides Redknapp can offer this. Stuart Pearce has a shot now, and who could fail to wish him well after the lost years under Capello where he was grandly tolerated, allowed to sit at the front like a hulking backward child with his shirt tucked into his underpants. Arsène Wenger, who won't go for it, is still a persuasive option, in part because he possesses the right kind of inconsolable dankness, stalking the touchline dressed in that drooping floor-length garment that is less a coat and more a very, very large plastic bag.

But no one quite has Redknapp's sudden sense of absolute aptness. Where once he seemed self-contained, slippery even, events at Southwark crown court have had a transformative effect. If it is possible for a man to have a good high-profile tax evasion trial, then this is exactly what Redknapp has done, emerging as a touchingly semiliterate scatterbrain, shirt tails flapping about all over the place. Often in Hollywood films there is a moment at the start called the "pat the dog scene" where the hero does something nice so that we know we're supposed to like him: Redknapp hasn't just patted the dog, he's practically dressed it up in a frilly Victorian costume and dragged it up in the witness box with him to drink a cup of tea and say "biscuits".

Aided by this glimpse of vulnerability, Redknapp now seems like the perfect balm to the dryness of Capello, as do his agreeably odd-couple assistants: nice, twinkly Kevin Bond and the furious Joe Jordan who looks not just like an angry, shouting, shell-suited man at a bus stop, but like the best angry, shouting, shell-suited man at a bus stop ever, the kind of cinematically compelling angry, shouting man for whom you can't help harbouring tender feelings of awed approval.

There has been a sub-debate in the last few days about Redknapp and "tactics" – what are they? Does he have them? – but this is largely irrelevant for now. The first requirement is not Englishness, or even a world‑beating capacity for forensic analysis. It is instead a degree of emotional translucence, an ability to cry real tears. With Redknapp the good times may or may not return to roll again. But that binding sense of agony – wonderful old-school agony – could be just around the corner.